Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 53

The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Where have the old ladies gone
Who worked in the brassiere salon
And helped women choose em
By clutching their bosom
For size and were always right on.



We walked over to Broadway & 81st last night and past the Town Shop lingerie store I remembered that Jenny told me back in the Nineties that the old lady clerks there did not use tape measures but simply grasped your breasts in both hands and decided 34B or whatever and almost always were right. A small New York fact that stayed in the back of my mind – I never mentioned it to anyone lest they think I was a pervert who stood by the window watching – but last night Jenny said that those old lady clerks are all gone and their measuring technique too. One more small New York fact bites the dust. What bothers me more is to look at a portfolio of Jill Krementz photographs of authors from the Sixties and Seventies. Every author there, from Tom Wolfe to Mailer to Roth to Margaret Mead to Perelman and Singer and Vonnegut and Morrison and Steinem – I recognized them instantly at a glance. I don’t think I know many authors by sight anymore. What’s worse, I doubt that others do. I think the era of Famous Writers is over. Most people have writers they enjoy but there aren’t writers you feel obligated as a literate person to know about – as people felt about Mailer and Roth and Steinem back then .

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Gradually a man comes to accept his limitations probably

I ordered a nice office chair online last week because I’m a writer — this is me, writing this — and I’ve written a truckload of stuff on an assortment of cranky kitchen chairs, some designed by federal agents to torture confessions out of suspects, and my lumbar region feels delicate, and while I’m at it, I may as well confess that I bought this chair from Jeff Bezos, the Nebuchadnezzar of American retail, because it’s easier than walking over to Acme Office Supply, and Bezos’s minions bring it to my door in a matter of days, and here it is.

It’s waiting for my wife to return from visiting relatives in Connecticut. She’s the one who Puts Things Together in this family. She has smaller fingers and finer digital skills, being a violinist, and unlike me, she reads directions. She assembles parts into a coherent whole. I am a writer and the problem of assembly puts me into a subjunctive mood and I might have solved it had I taken my time but what I assemble is a non sequitur and somewhere a child is weeping bitterly. So I wait for her to come home.

A couple weeks ago, a workman came to our apartment backdoor and asked me (I think) something about air conditioning. I believe he is Polish and some of his English sounded Polish to me so I notified my wife and he spoke to her and she pointed to a panel in the ceiling over the washer and dryer, and there it was, a condenser or whatever it’s called. I come from simple rural people; we worked in the sun and after a day of that, the shade was good enough, we didn’t require AC.

I used to resent competent people and now I am married to one. I was an English major in college and looked down on the engineering students in their polyester plaid shirts with plastic pocket protectors, and now we live in a digital world they designed and I can’t figure out how to make my iPhone deZoom after it has enlarged itself. I need to ask my wife, the one who reads directions.

A couple years ago, I couldn’t start my car one morning and had to call a tow truck. Back in the 20th century, you’d see a neighbor pull out of his driveway and wave to him and he’d get out jumper cables and start you up, but these days your neighbor is very likely an English major who wanted to be a writer but instead became an Executive Vice President for Branding and Inclusivity, which is a different branch of fiction, and if I wave at him, he’ll pretend not to see me. My dad, up to the mid-Sixties or so, was able to take his cars apart and do repairs. The neighbor guy and I are of a generation that Does Not Understand How Engines Work. So the tow truck started me up and I drove to a shop where the mechanic discovered that a malfunctioning lock on the trunk was draining my battery. Amazing. It’s like a boil on your rear end is the cause of your migraine. But he fixed it. This sort of competence is inspiring to me. And we are surrounded by it. If ever you should call the EMTs at 911, you’ll be swarmed by great competence.

Meanwhile, there is a cultural movement among us that argues that our world is systemically oppressive and corrupt, the institutions and laws, epistemology, mindsets, literature, politics, religion, cheeseburgers, cole slaw, rotted through and through by elitist masculine Western Eurocentric misogynistic homicidal hierarchical colonialist biases, and there is no such thing as commonality, community, competence, comedy, all of which are intrinsically unequal and tools of oppression, and I, as an oppressor, have internalized my dominance, accepting it as something earned, not inherited.

One could call this movement fascistic but it doesn’t really matter because I am 78 and the movement won’t take over the country until after I am gone, and meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, my love has assembled the chair and I sit in it and I feel so good, I write an elitist limerick, my favorite tool of oppression:

Classic, romantic, baroque,

Whether you sleep or are woke,

Remember this, Jack,

There’s no turning back

From the fact that you know you’re a joke.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, August 4, 2020

There was an old man who was born
In the land of ice cream and sweet corn
Out on the prairie
And feels happy (very)
Arising to work every morn
On a memoir
Of how lucky we are
Who find a vocation
In exhilaration,
To ward off the dark and forlorn.



This is the week I turn 78, a fitting age for one born on the 7th day of the 8th month, and then my next stop is 87. Nine more good years, I pray. I have another novel emerging, a screenplay, and we want to take the Queen Mary 2 over to London one more time, and visit Malene and Peter and Kaja in Prague and Byron and Mylene in Paris and then come home and get old. I doubt that I will ever stand on a stage again and tell stories, and that’s okay, though I’d love to sing with Robin and Linda and do another jazz club gig with Heather Masse. Small goals. A daily walk. A prime rib and a martini on my 80th. Yesterday a woman got out of the shower and asked me to rub lotion on her back and I told her, “If I got to do this every day, I’d be the happiest man in America,” and I meant it, people. Call it “white male privilege,” but some pleasures never fade.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, August 2, 2020

I miss worship service at ten
And wonder when will we again
Gather in pews
And put on the shoes
Of the gospel of peace
And our wisdom increase,
May it be soon, Lord, Amen.



One day runs into another, one project after another but not much progress is felt, a book is opened and soon shut, and the future remains as murky as ever, but I’m a lucky man with work in mind, a terrace to step out on, a happy daughter at summer camp, a grandson canoeing on the Boundary Waters being careful not to cross into Canada, and my lively and loving wife returning today from the seashore. A screenplay awaits, about the Fourth of July in Lake Wobegon. I hope to go scout some towns this fall.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, July 30, 2020

A song that I loved long ago
Came back to me yesterday so
I sang loud and clear
To my darling and dear
And now it is here and won’t go.



I was so happy to have her back, I remembered the old Jim Reeves song and leaned down and sang it to her:



Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone
And let’s pretend that we’re together, all alone.
I’ll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low
And you can tell your friend there with you he’ll have to go.



She was not moved the way I wished she were,
She simply sat and read the Times.
She never hung around in the old Mixers bar
And stuffed the jukebox with her dimes.



And now “He’ll Have To Go” keeps going around and around in my head. I have a memoir to work on today, I have a screenplay to finish, I need my mind to focus on the work while I still have a mind, before they send me off to the Home. Wait til you’re 77 and you’re walking a tightrope of pharmacology. When my friend Chet was this age, he sat forlorn, an overcoat over his shoulders, a guitar on his lap that he could no longer play. I sang a song to my dear wife last night and now it’s echoing in the canyons of the cerebellum. I need to know more people in their 80s and 90s to serve as my scouts up the trail. I’ve got George, 85, and he’s good, but I’m looking for more. My cousin Olive Darden died at 102 and I miss her, a cheery old lady. Hadassah is 100 but quite deaf, I hear. I need to get to work on this. Meanwhile, tell the man who’s there with you to beat it.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, July 29, 2020

I’m a lonesome old radio host
Whose wife just returned from the coast
To be my companion
In a Manhattan canyon
And bring conversation
And a sense of sensation
Which I’ve been needing the most.



It was only for two days and I got some things done in that great emptiness, such as start a murder mystery and sign a bunch of books, but her absence was felt keenly and it was a large moment when she walked in the door. A blessing of the pandemic. After two days of silence in an apartment, the return of the lover is triumphant, bands play, she rides in on an elephant accompanied by men waving scimitars. So now I wonder if we shouldn’t incorporate periods of monasticism into our lives when “normal” life resumes. Go sit on a mountaintop for a few weeks. Or, in Minnesota, sit by a river. In the late 70s I lived in a house by a creek that went over a waterfall by the bedroom window and I remember that my sleep was deeper in those years, helped by the low rumble of moving water. We come to accept a high level of confusion and racket as normal and this lockdown is a break from it. But I’m afraid it’s the racket I miss. I wish I were about to get on a bus for a 27-city tour doing shows with the band. A bunk on a bus rolling down the road toward Denver or Seattle, that’s what I miss.

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One man’s pandemic is another man’s picnic

I love reading columns that snap and crackle and poke powerful people in the kisser and I am bored by columns like this one, which is about the goodness and generosity of life, but what can I say? When you’re busy doing things you love and you skip the news for a while, life can be beautiful. My love and I have been absorbed in the lives of the mockingbird family in our backyard, the parents ratcheting at us when we set foot out back, the little beaks upraised, the relays of food, the first hesitant hops from the nest, the high anxiety, the chirps of the teenagers, and then one morning, nobody’s home. Gone. No word since.

Instead of studying Joe Biden’s 13-point lead in national polls, we were absorbed in the lives of birds. We’ve never run for public office, but we have been parents and we have empathy for them, even birds. It’s odd to me, at 77, to see two men my age running for the White House. I remember the excitement when Kennedy, 43, succeeded Eisenhower, 70. We needed that this year and it didn’t happen.

But thanks to the recumbent, the man in the large golf pants, we live in the Golden Age of delicious vicious columnry, the best of them being conservatives such as Jennifer Rubin and George Will whose outrage rises to great literary heights whereas old liberals like me sit and play “Honolulu Baby” on the ukulele and toss in a little tap dance. For Mr. Will, Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is like Mother poisoning Dad and marrying a Mafia hitman. I turn to Mr. Will in the Washington Post and feast on lines like “this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.”

It’s a great line and I have nothing to add to it. Mr. Will is a lifelong Republican conservative and he knows in his heart that the recumbent is no more a Republican than Nancy Pelosi is a pole-vaulter and the recumbent is no more a believing Christian than he is the Dalai Lama-rama-ding-dong. It is an insane moment in the history of the Republic and it drives Mr. Will wild, but to me, it’s just a TV show and I turn it off and go sit on the shady terrace and feast on these giant blueberries grown in Peru and feel content. I toss a few of them toward the mockingbirds’ nest, hoping to lure them back, but no such luck.

I am almost 78 and America’s problems are my grandchildren’s problems, not mine, and I have been married for 25 years to a woman who thrills me and to avoid the plague we’ve spent four months in close proximity and it’s been good. I am capable of bitter sarcasm — I had a column all set to go about the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., dropping the word “colony” from its name because it suggested exclusivity and hierarchy. But I don’t care about artists’ colonies, have no interest in spending time in one, am grateful to be excluded. The higher the ark the better; I don’t want to get on board. The street carnival in Portland is not my concern, except to hope that nobody gets hurt. The Bullying that is going on over Capitalization of certain words is — how shall I say it? — Remarkable. As for racism, there is no room for it in the Christian faith where it continues to thrive.

I come from a generation that spent 57,000 American lives in a war that had no point then and has no defenders now and American cruise ships now dock at Hue and Da Nang and Saigon and folks from Omaha and Seattle eat in sidewalk cafes whose owners may have been among the guerillas who defeated us and who cares?

Madame and I have our own colony, and beyond that, each of us has a circle of pals, which the pandemic lockdown makes all the more enjoyable. Theaters are dark and concert halls, but the telephone still works and now that people are sticking close to home, the phone calls get longer and more fulfilling and launch into stories, and we don’t bother talking politics, we talk family history, which is more interesting. And if asked what we’re up to, we will talk about mockingbirds.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, July 26, 2020

Our mockingbird family has flown
And we sit on the terrace alone,
Missing our neighbors,
Their parenting labors,
Who worked without rest
Bringing food to the nest,
To the squawks and squeaks
Of wide open beaks.
We wish them well off on their own
But wish they would write us or phone.



A perfect summer evening with neighbors on the terrace, a little breeze, a few choppers in the sky, the city peaceful under a half moon, light conversation about this and that, nothing about him, talk about daughters, the pediatric psychiatric nurse-practitioner, the mathematician niece expecting a baby, the resumption of baseball, a trip to Maine, music, the difference between Dairy Queen and Mister Freeze, and how much we miss our birds, how whenever we came outdoors the parents took up defensive positions and threatened us. Do a mockingbird couple and their kiddoes stay together when they flee the nest? Might they return? We don’t know. We never fed them, not wanting to make them dependent, but we miss the shrieking and the chittering of the babies. Yes, I know — life must be awfully easy for you guys if you miss a bird family — well, not necessarily, but anyway we do. It’s a dangerous world, hawks and cormorants zooming overhead. And God’s eye is on the sparrow and we know He watches us.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, July 25, 2020

I sat last night at the box
Watching the Twins play the Sox,
No fans, just the men,
Life seems normal again,
Rational and orthodox.



A big event, our first venture out to eat since the plague descended, and on a beautiful Friday night, there were waiting lines everywhere, the Italian place around the corner, and all along Amsterdam in the 80s, and finally we found a vegan place, around 82nd. Good enough food but loud hip-hop music, the sort that makes us feel berserk, no melody, just repetition like a broken record or an alarm clock, and service was slow, so it was torture. But back at the apartment, Jenny got me hooked up to the Twins opener and I sat and watched, mesmerized. So good to have baseball back. I liked it without fans, all the focus on the game, no closeups of couples kissing. My hero Max Kepler, a slight fellow who appears to be about 14, hit two home runs and the Twins pounded the Sox, 10-5. The Twins fabulous CF Byron Buxton is expected back soon after a foot injury. So there is hope. Rosario looked good, Cruz, Arraez is a great bad-pitch hitter, but what looked fabulous was the diamond itself, grass, bases, infield dirt, fences. It’s been a long wait.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, July 23, 2020

An old man wrote his memoir
About how tasty things are,
Orange marmalade,
Bands on parade,
Hot dogs, a Cuban cigar,
The smell of his dear,
Her lips in his ear,
Offering him beer in a jar,
The July atmosphere,
The stars bright and clear,
Driving at night in his car,
Listening to 12-string guitar,
Now 78,
The night’s getting late,
He’s thinking: so good, and so far.



All my life I’ve had two or three things going at one time and I hope this never ends, though of course it will. Finished with the novel, working on the memoir, got a screenplay going, and now I’m thinking ahead to winter, remembering how good La Jolla was back in January. Got a little video of Heather’s little girl, standing on the ocean shore jumping up and down for pleasure at seeing the waves roll in. I sang duets with Heather when this girl was in utero and now she is saying words and soon sentences. I should write a book for her to read when she’s ready. I want to do standup again. I want to do a Prairie Home reunion. Another Lake Wobegon novel. Jenny is anxious to get back to playing in the viola section of the orchestra. The future awaits. Just have to get past November.

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